


Ghosts

by Slyboots



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Bickering, Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff, Gift Fic, Light Angst, M/M, Nostalgia, Scary Movies, Transform or Treat 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:27:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27304840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyboots/pseuds/Slyboots
Summary: “Horror movies,” muttered Starscream, into the velvety silence of his quarters. “Of all the appalling wastes of processing cycles--”Soundwave's "side project" is the preservation of Cybertronian culture...up to and including low-budget horror movies. Starscream is decidedly skeptical.
Relationships: Soundwave/Starscream (Transformers)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 61





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Written for thembostarscream on Tumblr, for their transform-or-treat 2020 prompt "TFP Starscream and soundwave cuddle for horror movie night, star is very scared and soundwave protects his eyes from the screen.” I hope you enjoy it, and happy Halloween!

The data flowed, a bright river of signal. Soundwave dipped a tendril of consciousness into the stream, a kaleidoscope of memories flickering through his processor: the uncanny glow of Energon spattered on a crumbling wall; the choking smell of the steam tunnels beneath Nova Cronum; a looping fragment of a Velocitronian splatter film, the killer eternally brandishing his buzzsaw--

Cheaply-made shockers blended into historical footage, and history into nightmares. Soundwave catalogued them all, dutifully. Later, he knew, he’d splice the most beautiful into his memory banks for safekeeping. He’d shiver at the  _ frisson _ of saws biting through armor, the sharp turquoise of freshly-spilled Energon. He’d delight in the play of color and sound.

But now he stood impassive at his station, a stone in a whirlpool of data. He might’ve stood there forever.

“Soundwave.”

Starscream fancied himself stealthy; yet the hiss of air over his wings announced his presence.

With a tiny click Soundwave disengaged a cable from the console; it slithered behind him, sensors firing. Starscream’s uneasy stance and the icy smell of his polish cut seamlessly into the rush of sensory data.

“Your progress report was--” Starscream’s synth clicked, as if searching for words; he subvocalized as he thought. In the flow of electricity through Starscream’s fuselage and the barely-audible buzz of his voicebox, Soundwave caught the echo of Starscream’s mind. “--most enlightening.”

A progress bar flashed up on the console, tinting the dimly-lit bay burnt orange. Starscream’s wings twitched with frustration.

“You  _ assure _ me your little side project is getting results?”

The progress bar ticked forward, pixel by pixel.

“In Lord Megatron’s most  _ regrettable _ absence--”

Starscream’s dishonesty was written in his tone. Soundwave allowed it, as he’d allowed it a thousand times. It was almost endearingly consistent.

“The weight of the war effort falls on our capable shoulders. When Lord Megatron returns from his jaunt in deep space, which I  _ dearly _ hope will be any solar cycle now--I--ah--” Starscream trailed off. “What exactly are you doing, Soundwave?”

He’d not read the report, or else not understood it. No matter. Soundwave could be patient.

On the console, Zeta Prime’s final speech to the prefects of Vos flickered to life. “--and I will make my  _ personal _ mission,” boomed the long-dead Prime to a hall of dead lackeys, “the preservation of Cybertron’s legacy--”

Ghosts, all of them, from a decadent time. Soundwave’s memory banks were thronged with the faces and voices of the dead.

Starscream jerked back, his wings fluttering. “Yes. Yes, I see.” The clip had rattled him--or perhaps he’d recognized rivals in the crowd. “Carry on, Soundwave.”

The clip guttered out. In its place Soundwave pulled up another, and Megatron’s voice echoed noble and impassioned: “ _ Do you see _ ? Do you really?”

“Horror movies,” muttered Starscream, into the velvety silence of his quarters. “Of all the appalling wastes of processing cycles--”

Soundwave’s plating clicked as he settled onto the berth.

“--though perversely  _ captivating _ ,” Starscream added in a low rush. “An invaluable piece of Cybertronian culture, I’m  _ sure _ .”

In Megatron’s absence, Soundwave reflected, Starscream sought  _ his _ approval now.

They’d taken, in the last stellar cycle, to meeting in the privacy of Starscream’s quarters. Their bargain had been silent: Soundwave would listen (as Soundwave always listened), and Starscream would trust his judgment.

(More or less--and Soundwave could live with that.)

Starscream paced the cramped bunk, the hydraulics beneath his wings clicking in an agitated rhythm. In his own back struts Soundwave felt Starscream’s tension.

Soundwave’s cables snaked, their rubber housing squeaking, across the floor. He tasted dust, and sharp jet-exhaust, and the ghosts of history--

One cable jimmied aside a console panel, screwing with a prickle of current into place. The console flickered to life, casting a hazy glow over them both. Heavy with data, the cable twitched, and Starscream nearly tripped over it.

Amusement flared, distantly, in Soundwave’s chest. A second cable wrapped around Starscream’s waist, pulling him inexorably down onto the berth.

A flurry of sensory data blossomed over Soundwave’s HUD. Starscream’s fuselage vibrated softly, his turbines thrumming; his plating was chilly, six point seven degrees below normal, slick with condensation. As if he’d just landed from a reconnaissance flight through Earth’s thin and bracing atmosphere.

Starscream was a feast for the senses: the simmering tension in him, the garrote-wire anxiety, the surges of current across his fuselage. Soundwave tasted the shape of his thoughts, if not the content.

“Unhand me, Soundwave,” he rasped, plainly not meaning it. “You are manhandling a superior officer--”

Soundwave regarded him for an instant. The cable loosened, slithering back. His feelers brushed, inquisitively, over the base of Starscream’s wing-joints. 

“Oh, very  _ well _ .” The tension leaked out. A whisper of static discharged from Starscream’s plating into the air. “If you must.”

On his visor Soundwave brought up a jittering line graph of Starscream’s surface charge.

Starscream’s brows drew together. His synth clicked. “Yes.  _ Thoroughly _ uninformative as ever.”

The caption flashed on Starscream’s console:  _ Detected autonomic arousal 49% above resting state. Sustained anxiety is associated with fiber optic burnout, turbine wear, and internal temperature dysregulation. Recommended course of action-- _

Starscream’s surface charge spiked with pique. “Perhaps you ought to  _ remain _ ...enigmatic.”

The console blinked and refreshed. Soundwave’s feelers stroked Starscream’s back, scratching so lightly they left no mark on the gleaming paint.

Starscream’s turbines slowed, the air they discharged fractionally cooler. He curled into himself, hugging his knees, wingtips scraping the wall as they fluttered. “I suggest we get on with this, ah, cultural exercise.”

For a klik Soundwave regarded him. Two data-streams rushed, vibrant and bold, through his processor: the echo of old Cybertron, a film perfectly preserved, the play of light and color so vivid he could smell the tangy stage Energon; and bright and shivering beneath his cable, Starscream--

Past and present. The dead and the very much alive. Soundwave’s Spark pulsed in its chamber.

The  _ Nemesis _ ’s air was thin and icy. The whole ship reverberated with history. She’d been a research vessel once, he remembered, and Starscream’s quarters were the stark and cheerless bunk of a scientific officer. No place for a nervous mech.

He drew Starscream closer; Starscream’s synthesizer chirped, but he made no move to resist, and he leaned perceptibly toward Soundwave.

Company, of a kind.

The film crackled to life. Starscream’s wings twitched, startled. Instantly he composed himself. He’d been, Soundwave knew, so absorbed in the uneasy joy of touch--of  _ companionship _ \--he’d forgotten for a klik why they were here.

Soundwave decided he could live with that.

A Nova Cronum film studio’s logo flashed onscreen. Soundwave’s memory banks filled for a nanocycle with information:  _ founded three hundred and seventy-four stellar cycles antebellum; converted to an Autobot propaganda outlet three stellar cycles after the Decepticon rebellion-- _

“You’re thinking about something,” said Starscream suspiciously.

He was. Soundwave inclined his head.

“Do you ever  _ cease _ plotting?”

Projection. A common defense mechanism. Soundwave allowed it, and light soothing circles he traced on Starscream’s back. Beneath the plating he felt gears unstick and cables go slack, a near-silent symphony of clicks and twitches.

Tense music swelled, faintly tinny in reproduction. The film’s title flickered, Energon-blue:  _ Chop Shop _ .

“Tasteful.”

“ _ Cultural exercise _ ,” said Soundwave, in a perfect echo of Starscream’s voice.

The music rose, a pulsating theremin drone, filling the bunk. Soundwave drank it up. Onscreen, a red-and-white Seeker with a nurse’s neat decals bustled round a shabby operating theater; the camera swooped after him, dodging and weaving. Something sprawled, out of focus, on the operating table. Soundwave’s mind filled in the gaps.

He’d archived a hundred thousand salvaged Cybertronian films, and he’d learned their rhythms and their visual language. Soundwave understood cinema like a mother tongue.

“What? What’s going on?” Starscream squinted at the screen as if it’d insulted him personally.

Tiresome. Soundwave’s feelers scratched along the leading edge of Starscream’s wing.

The camera banked hard, the soundtrack screeching. The husk of a racer lay, peeled down to the Spark chamber, on the operating table. Too-thick stage Energon had been daubed across her mangled belly.

Soundwave, who had seen corpses enough for a lifetime, felt no flicker of emotion. Starscream’s gears clicked a little faster, and Soundwave tilted his head, wondering--

“I’m  _ squeamish _ ,” said Starscream stiffly. “We Seekers do our dirty work from a distance.”

But Soundwave had tasted a hint of fear-transmitters in his exhaust.

Absently he wondered how Starscream, whose memory was imperfect and his perception narrow, must see the world. How odd it must be to see a film for the first time without knowing it already by heart. Cinema held few surprises for Soundwave.

Soundwave was unsure for a cycle whether to pity Starscream or envy him.

The scene changed. A flock of slender Air Command cadets thronged an unconvincing barracks. Starscream sat up straighter, his face bright with undisguised nostalgia.

“That’s the Vosian Flight Academy. Or something  _ purporting _ to be.” His lip curled. “That takes me back, Soundwave. We’d take leave to go into the city--Thundercracker would drag us kicking and screaming to the second-run theater--”

_ Thundercracker _ . His dossier flashed up in Soundwave’s mind.

Starscream’s signal slowed again to a comfortable trickle. He settled back, wings relaxing. Some thought flickered across his neural net, just out of Soundwave’s grasp, as if the memory of Thundercracker had stirred something in him.

Starscream, too, had his ghosts.

“Undoubtedly they’re all going to get butchered.” A slow smug smile spread across Starscream’s faceplate. Pleased with himself, then, for guessing the plot.

Soundwave allowed him that much.

The prettiest of the Seekers repeated lines of dialogue Soundwave had heard a thousand times in other films. Still he filed them away in his memory banks. 

( _ Bailout _ , he recalled dimly.  _ A singer-turned-actor from Helex. Active 20 to 13 stellar cycles antebellum. Retired after a slew of bad reviews and a disfiguring crash while intoxicated. Identified among the fatalities after the Autobot siege of Helex. _ At times Soundwave recognized the dead more intimately than the living.)

Starscream listened to every line as if they were fresh still, chuckling and shivering at all the right intervals. “He’s the hero, isn’t he?”

Soundwave inclined his head.

“I should have known. What a vapid faceplate.  _ Shockwave _ would play the role better--even  _ after _ his tragic demise.” Starscream laughed; Soundwave merely listened.

Again the scene changed, the music swelling again. Soundwave let the music carry him away.

After several cycles, Starscream’s tanks growled, and Soundwave’s HUD flashed a prompt. With a soft click he detached Laserbeak, cool air rushing over his exposed breastplate.

The door slid open; the door shut. Laserbeak was gone.

Onscreen, the nurse stalked through the corridors of a dimly-lit hospital; at satisfyingly predictable intervals the scene cross-cut to the Seeker cadets, stumbling in the dark.

“Those  _ fools. _ Why won’t they turn on their lights?” Starscream’s voice was hot with annoyance. “Do they  _ intend _ to get slaughtered?”

Again Soundwave marveled: Starscream  _ cared _ .

A screech on the soundtrack--a spray of Energon--the camera lingering voyeuristically on a twitching hand--

Starscream, who’d jumped, chuckled uncertainly. “Are you  _ trying _ to crush my fuselage, Soundwave?”

Soundwave relaxed his cable, obligingly, and Starscream leaned against it. His weight was oddly grounding; without it Soundwave might have drifted away on a tide of memories and data--

The soft whirr of the door signaled Laserbeak’s return, laden with Energon crystals. Starscream blinked, his brow knitting. “You do think of everything.”

It was perhaps not entirely a compliment. Soundwave replayed, amplified, the empty gurgle of Starscream’s tanks.

Starscream’s plating heated. “Desist immediately. By order of your commanding officer.” Yet he popped a crystal into his mouth.

For cycles there was no sound save the actors’ babbling, the warble of the theremin, and the soft crunch of Energon crystals.

When silent, Soundwave decided, Starscream was better company. Gently he rubbed Starscream’s spinal struts, savoring the warmth, the glossy smoothness of his finish. Electricity hummed over Starscream’s plating, making Soundwave’s feelers tingle.

Not for the first time he found himself half-lost in Starscream’s thoughts--Starscream, who was no long-dead actor nor a distant wartime memory, and who still had the capacity to surprise.

“Thank you, Soundwave.”

Soundwave tilted his head, his cables’ housing crackling.

“You don’t process solid Energon, do you?” Starscream eyed the last Energon crystal. His gaze flickered to Soundwave’s featureless visor, the question in his mind plain.

Soundwave’s cable snaked around Starscream, delicately picking up the crystal. The cable’s end clicked open with a tiny slurp. In a puff of pulverized Energon the crystal was gone; Soundwave’s HUD fuel gauge ticked up a notch.

“Ah.”

Soundwave flashed an icon--salvaged from the long-silent Grid--on his visor. A blank inscrutable smile.

A touch of art, he felt. At times his mind felt as abstract--as  _ compressed _ \--as the icon, as if his emotions were pixel-shallow.

And for that, too, he sometimes envied Starscream.

Starscream’s optics burned, as if some fire behind them had been stoked. “If you are laughing at me, Soundwave, I’ll have you cut up for parts--”

Onscreen the nurse’s buzzsaw squealed. Starscream shuddered.

Cycles passed, Starscream inching steadily closer. Soundwave’s cable held him fast, vibrating as Starscream shivered.

“You  _ are _ laughing at me, aren’t you?” he said at last, in tones of resignation.

Soundwave watched and Soundwave listened.

“Curse you to the Pit, why don’t you  _ speak _ ?”

“I don’t need to.” The nurse’s voice, an unearthly rasp.

Starscream hugged his knees, drawing into himself, his stare accusing. His fuselage was warming. “ _ Must _ you speak in multimedia? Is your processor some--some glitched  _ archive _ of every wretched horror film and forgotten speech?”

A quick nod. How odd to be so thoroughly understood. Too intimate. He felt for a cycle as if the connection ran the other way, as if Starscream’s mind--hot and keen--were scraping against his, as if his memories were flowing out through the cable.

“Ought to remain enigmatic,” he said, in Starscream’s voice. And then, the clips overlapping, “Do you ever cease plotting--get on with this cultural exercise--”

Starscream scowled, but fell silent.

Without ceremony Soundwave reached, gently, for the small of Starscream’s back. His fingertips brushed beneath the wing joints.

Starscream’s wing twitched sharply. Yet he leaned into Soundwave’s arm panel, his cables rustling and snapping.

Soundwave tasted, mingled as one, his distrust and his skin-hunger. Starscream was at times as easy to read as a cheap horror film.

They huddled together. For cycles Soundwave’s processor slowed, comfortably liquid. He savored Starscream’s weight, the tingling vibration of his fuselage, as he savored light and sound and memory.

Starscream tensed a little more with every death. At the spray of Energon he squawked and twitched, pulling for a klik away--yet always he returned to Soundwave.

With one fingertip Soundwave stroked Laserbeak’s back. With his other hand and with his cable he massaged Starscream’s armor, lightly as the touch of a ghost, drinking up Starscream’s nervousness and his tension and the bitter tingle of his uncertainty.

He’d missed such closeness. In millennia past he’d drunk up Megatron’s thoughts, and Orion Pax’s--

But his old comrades were ghosts too now, so distant they might as well be dead.

The theremin hummed, and Starscream yelped, his elbow slamming back into Soundwave’s side. How novel to be touched.

A sharp prickle of current flooded over Starscream’s armor, more vivid even than his scream or the fear in his optics.

How intimate.

Starscream’s wings fluttered as he settled back onto the berth. “You heard nothing. You  _ saw _ nothing.”

“Heard nothing,” repeated Soundwave in Starscream’s voice. “Saw nothing.”

For a cycle they sat side by side, entwined in Soundwave’s cable. For a cycle the past died away, the whispers of information fading into a distant background hum. Starscream was  _ real _ in his arms.

From the film, Soundwave’s gaze drifted to Starscream’s taut faceplate, to his shaking hands. The console’s dull orange glow reflected in Starscream’s armor, shimmering and subtle. He smelled of polish and fear.

Yes--he was worth recalling, the play of light across his finish more intoxicating by half than the film. Soundwave filed away every detail of him, for safekeeping.

For a cycle they sat in charged silence.

He’d almost forgotten the film when the theremin squealed, and Starscream’s armor reflected the stark blue of sprayed Energon. Starscream shrieked, current surging in him; he’d been pent-up, and now it leaked with a fierce crackle into the air. “ _ Scrap! _ ”

The intensity was biting. Soundwave’s own armor pulsed with secondhand charge.

His third cable pressurized, hissing to life. Before Starscream could react, it had wrapped around his faceplate, shielding his optics.

“Oh,  _ very _ funny,” Starscream spat, and Soundwave felt him relax by degrees, pistons loosening. “You may jump at ghosts and shadows, Soundwave, but I assure you, I do not--”

Still he made no move to push Soundwave’s cable away. Until the film’s credits rolled they sat tangled together, shoulder to shoulder.

“That was,” said Starscream carefully, “certainly enlightening.”

Soundwave released him, his cables retracting. He nodded, slow as time.

“You may proceed with your archival project.” Starscream rubbed his flank, where Soundwave’s cables had trailed lightly along the armor. As if he felt still the ghost of Soundwave’s touch. “No need to  _ personally  _ show me any more of this garbage.”

Again Soundwave nodded.

They sat knee to knee, in no hurry to move.

“Thank you,” said Starscream at last, with an affronted little flutter. “Dismissed.”

Into his memory banks Soundwave poured a flood of sensations. Still Starscream felt almost real in his arms. He’d replay this night, he knew, a thousand times.

His cables tingled with the echo of Starscream’s fear.


End file.
